Scientists Have Discovered What Makes Indian Food So Goddamn Good

Whenever someone who’s obviously never had Indian food before asks me what makes it so good, I ignore the question and take another bite — the MacGyver-ed naan wrap on my plate isn’t going to eat itself. Like most fans of cury and cayenne, I eat everything first and ask questions later. However, according to The Washington Post, data researchers at the Indian Institute for Technology crunched the numbers and figured out what makes traditional recipes tick:

It does something radical with flavors, something very different from what we tend to do in the United States and the rest of Western culture. And it does it at the molecular level.

European and American dishes tend to utilize components with flavors that sometimes overlap one another, often in complimentary ways. Indian cuisine? Not so much:

They examined how much the underlying flavor compounds overlapped in single dishes and discovered something very different from Western cuisines. Indian cuisine tended to mix ingredients whose flavors don’t overlap at all.

“We found that average flavor sharing in Indian cuisine was significantly lesser than expected,” the researchers wrote.

In other words, the more overlap two ingredients have in flavor, the less likely they are to appear in the same Indian dish.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that cayenne, cardamom, and the other spices that make Indian food taste like heaven clash with one another. Rather, each serves a unique purpose in each dish they’re used in — even when combined with five or more additional ingredients.

Great, now I’m having a Pavlovian reaction to writing and reading about Indian food. Looks like takeout tonight and bathroom cleaning tomorrow.

Bad Indian food is horrible. Good Indian food is fantastic. The first time I had Indian food, it was at a mall in Washington DC. Took me five years to try Indian food again. Went to a fine sit-down restaurant and it was great.

A lot depends on where you live. For instance, I live in Denmark and indian food here is meh. It will sustain you and taste mildly pleasant. Went to a really good indian place in London on a vacation – my world shattered and my brain melted, it was that great.

I imagine the comments here mainly reflect where people live. If you live in a good food city (i.e. a multicultural metropolitan centre), you probably enjoy Indian food (and Thai, Japanese, Dim Sum, etc. etc.) if youtube in a smaller city where there’s one or two Indian restaurants, you may not be getting the best of it.

Also Andrew, if you have to clean your bathroom after eating Indian, you may need to try a different restaurant. That shouldn’t happen.

Indian food is instant diarrhea, halitosis, and body odor. Even “good” Indian food. Disgusting is not the word. Sickening. Anyone who has worked in an indoors/office environment with an Indian person or an Indian food fanatic knows what I mean. It’s like spending all day working in a garbage dump in mid-August.

Horrible. Why would anyone want to smell like a vomit and dog shit concoction from 20 feet away all day long?

And the problem is that Indian people and frequent Indian food eaters have had their senses of smell and taste deadened by the strength and frequency of eating it. They’ve built up a tolerance to how awful it is. All in the name of foodie vanity/showing off or cultural differences. There’s really not much worse than some lame braggart dropping sentiments like “Look at how worldly I am for eating a plate of baby shit and rotting corpse smelling garbage!!!”

You’re not brave. You stink. Really, really badly.

Not much different than potheads who’ve burnt out their sense of smell and can no longer tell how badly they stink after smoking up in their car before going into a public place. Everyone knows yours high because you stink. Dummy.

I understand that Indian isn’t always the most appealing, but all of you people claiming it tastes gross have never had a decent Indian dish.

It’s gloriously delicious. Nothin’ better than a lazy Sunday afternoon, getting baked, and sitting down to an Indian buffet except you’ll sleep for about 12 hours when you finally waddle home to your couch.